Witnessing humanity’s role in dying off of species

Henry Holt and Co.

To look into the eyes of a frog is to travel back in time. The earliest amphibians hoisted themselves out of the water some 370 millions years ago, long before there were any birds in flight, mammals scurrying around or even dinosaurs stomping the Earth.

A full chronicle of amphibian history would start before the existence of the seven continents, when the only land mass on our planet was an expanse scientists have labelled Pangaea, not yet splintered by tectonic plates.

Squishy and soft though they may be, amphibians are in fact hardy survivors. Since life appeared on Earth 3.5 billion years ago, there have been five major extinction events, traumatic changes in climate and environment that have felled many, and sometimes most, species existing at a particular moment.

With their mournful, limpid eyes, amphibians have witnessed four of these five extinction events, the most spectacular and notorious being the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs and many other species 65 million years ago.

The unsettling news of Elizabeth Kolbert’s powerful book, The Sixth Extinction, is that we are witnessing a wide-scale dying off of species comparable to the earlier extinction events. An early and startling symptom of the sixth extinction is the sudden and global collapse of countless varieties of frogs, the very animal whose ancestors were so adept at surviving.

The culprit behind this extinction is no asteroid but a single species: humanity. In countless ways, we are rendering the Earth uninhabitable to many of our fellow Earth-dwellers.

Kolbert notes that “it is estimated that one-third of all reef-building corals, a third of all freshwater mollusks, a third of sharks and rays, a quarter of all mammals, a fifth of all reptiles, and a sixth of all birds are headed toward oblivion.”

Why is our planet once again turning into a spherical graveyard? Climate change, the full impact of which we only have a small glimmer of, is a major cause. It’s darkly ironic that the very dinosaurs wiped out by that fateful asteroid are now the fossil fuels igniting another extinction event.

But beyond climate change, many of the traits that make humanity so successful as a species are also lethal to other lifeforms. Our versatility and cleverness have allowed us to expand into virtually every corner of the globe, bringing into fragile ecosystems invasive new species that eliminate the local competition.

Humanity has so thoroughly transformed the planet that we may be the first life form that deserves to have a geological epoch named after us, the Anthropocene.

Mass extinction is a grim topic, yet Kolbert’s book is an exhilarating read. A staff writer for The New Yorker, Kolbert has wisely marshalled her arguments into the form of an intellectual adventure. She notes that one of the scientists she meets “decided to become a paleontologist when he was seven, after reading a Tintin adventure about a dig.”

Kolbert has cast herself as Tintin, a globe-trotting reporter joining field researchers all over the world as they try to solve the ultimate murder mystery: Why are so many animals dying and how can we stop it?

The Sixth Extinction deals with the most important possible topic, the fate of life on Earth, in a responsible, entertaining and mind-expanding way. It is profound without being ponderous, edifying without being hectoring.

It’s a tribute to Kolbert’s achievement that I also ended up having some serious philosophical reservations about her ultimate argument.

Kolbert wants to avoid blaming the sixth extinction merely on industrial modernity and instead asks us to think of it as an outgrowth of humanity’s supposedly inherent alienation from nature.

As sober as she is, Kolbert ends up adopting a position of misanthropy (or as she says, “sounding anti-human.”)

Kolbert’s misanthropy is bemused rather than scornful. But still the burden of her argument is that right from the start humanity was always bad news, a position she finds support for in humankind’s possible role in extinguishing sibling species such as the Neanderthal and the Denisovan.

Rather than pondering the uncertain demise of the Neanderthal, she would have been better off reading environmental historians such as Alfred Crosby’s Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900 (1986), whose accounts of extinction give room for human agency.

The ecological crisis we face is so severe that we can’t afford the luxury of misanthropy. Throughout the book Kolbert is too dismissive of efforts at conservation, which are surely inadequate but still worth supporting. Rather than browbeating ourselves about the inherent wickedness of our species, we need to use one of the greatest gifts of nature, our intelligence, to learn to live at peace with our fellow creatures.

The violence that humans have done to the planet will not heal easily, and countless species have already died or are doomed.